


Debriefing

by tawg



Series: The Dangers of Dating a High School Principal [12]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: AU - civilian Phil, Established Relationship, M/M, Principal Coulson, Repercussions, intimately swabbed, late night makeouts, level seven cockblocking, scary relationship talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 22:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Phil have some important issues that need addressing. <i>In their pants.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Debriefing

As far as all SHIELD personnel were concerned, Clint and Bruce were up to their necks in trouble. Agent Sitwell had been very disappointed with them. Agent Hill had been incensed. Director Fury had lived up to his name, though Clint was sure that at least part of his rage stemmed from the meeting with the World Security Council he’d been forced to conduct on the matter of their little pest extermination program. 

They’d set fire to _one_ colony of malevolent psychic-fungus infected alien horses, and suddenly everyone felt the need to talk to them about their priorities. Bruce had responded with some very measured and considered opinions about the ethics of maintaining that kind of psychotically damaging symbiotic interaction for any length of time, and had followed up with an assertion that all members of the Avengers Initiative had a responsibility to address any and all threats to the wider population as soon as they arose.

Clint had simply bit out that he’d burn down a lot more if it meant that thing was gone. 

So they were in trouble, but the fact that they hadn’t been thrown into a cell indicated that Fury wasn’t too cut up about their recent activities. Bruce had soured a few friendships with the SHIELD researchers he sometimes ate lunch with (which Tony would probably be pleased about – he had never been fond of sharing his pet scientist), and Clint had a strong suspicion that his life would be made slightly more difficult than it previously would have been. But early reports suggested that the horses would recover, and Thor was apparently thrilled at the opportunity to go riding on a beast that could carry his weight.

Clint and Bruce were required to attend a number of compulsory security and risk assessment seminars in the coming weeks, and they both had restricted access to SHIELD sites until their post-evil-fungus-infection psychological evaluations were completed. As Clint’s SHIELD quarters were in a high-security building (being a key marksman meant that he was usually kept close to both high-risk projects and the more interesting armouries), he was informed that he’d be spending the rest of his recovery at Stark Tower. 

He had snuck out of the tower almost as soon as he arrived, though Pepper had spotted him in the lobby and told him to say hello to Phil for her. Clint was surprised by the request as he wasn’t aware that they had met, but perhaps it was a kind of etiquette to ask after other people’s significant others that he simply didn’t know about. 

It was so late that it was early by the time Clint reached Phil’s place of residence. He’d ridden his bike and while it felt good to be away from the sleek dark cars driven by a certain class of agent, his shoulder was stiff and aching as he parked in the small parking lot behind Phil’s building. Phil did not live in a great area, and when Clint had first started hanging around he’d made a point of being tough and obvious. He didn’t want anyone toying with his ride while he wasn’t around to defend its honour. Clint preferred the swells and curves of classic-style roadsters – he was honestly a little jealous of Steve’s beautiful motorbike – but the machine he rode was a lithe sports bike, composed of tightly calculated angles. It was fast and hardy, and Clint had a strange kind of fun going over it every few weeks and pulling out the various SHIELD tracking devices that somehow crept into the little crannies. 

He hadn’t had time to clean it off since returning to New York, and he didn’t care. SHIELD had been through Phil’s apartment and Phil had been through one of SHIELD’s facilities in return. Clint was a grown man and he was visiting his boyfriend, and maybe people still looked at him like his dick needed to be kept on a leash but they had never meant jack to Clint anyway. Natasha approved of Phil and that was a blessing that none of his previous partners had received. Clint had lived through a very rough few weeks, and he was going to curl up with his boyfriend like a normal person would. 

Normal people might not drop around at two in the morning, but they did take the stairs rather than scaling the side of the building. Maybe picking the locks to Phil’s apartment was also a little abnormal, but Phil had never expressed any distaste about the habit and Clint was pretty sure that sitting in the hall until sunrise was the weirder option. Clint leaned against the doorframe of Phil’s bedroom and watched him sleep for a moment. He wasn’t going to think to hard about which camp that particular action belonged to.

Phil slept on his stomach with one arm up under his pillow and the other folded close to his chest. He had one leg fully extended and the other bent at the knee, leaving him half-sprawled across the mattress. Mittens was curled up by Phil’s extended leg, napping with her chin resting on the back of his thigh just above his knee. Phil was wearing sleep pants and had the quilt tangled around his middle, but the skin of his back that was visible was bare. Clint suspected that Phil would be warm to touch. Warm and sleepy and appetising. 

Clint was three steps into the room when Mittens the Second awoke and leapt off the bed, her motion causing Phil to stir. Mittens was apparently a generally nervous cat, and Phil had assured Clint in the past that there was no need for him to take her rapid exits personally. However, when Clint crouched down beside Phil’s bed and reached out to cup the side of Phil’s face, his own relationship with the cat wasn’t exactly a pressing concern.

Phil blinked sleepily at Clint in the dim light of the bedroom, and then his face split into a warm smile. “Hey,” he said in a low voice. Clint kissed him in response.

It was hard to believe that it was hours away from being a whole fortnight since he had kissed Phil last. Hard to believe that he had been sitting around and staring at the countryside when he could instead have had his eyes closed and Phil’s mouth under his own, sucking at Phil’s lower lip and feeling Phil’s mouth open. Clint pressed himself forwards and Phil shifted back obligingly, rolling onto his side to make room for Clint to crawl onto the bed and then shifting onto his back as Clint kept pressing forwards, desperate to sling a leg over Phil’s hips and press their bodies together. 

Phil had a hand at the back of Clint’s neck, dragging his fingertips back and forth through the short hair there. His other hand was at Clint’s hip, gripping it tightly and then relaxing, easing under Clint’s t-shirt and sliding over the chilled skin beneath. Clint pulled away from Phil just long enough to strip his shirt off, and then pressed himself back down, adoring the feel of the spread of warm skin against his chest, loving the way Phil’s hand explored Clint’s lower back, fingers pressing along the line of Clint’s spine and then a warm palm smoothing away Clint’s shivers of delight.

“Missed you,” Clint murmured between slow kisses, and Phil hummed in agreement. Clint ground his hips down and felt the hardness of Phil’s cock as Phil arched up in return. Clint cupped Phil’s hip and then slid his hand back and down, under the soft fabric of Phil’s sleep pants, cupping the warm, firm muscle of Phil’s ass. Clint dipped his head down and bit at Phil’s jaw. “Want you,” he murmured.

“Clint,” Phil gasped, which was a pretty positive sign when coupled with the way his hand gripped at Clint’s left shoulder. “Clint, wait.”

Clint pressed his nose against the skin beneath Phil’s ear and then busied himself with sucking at Phil’s neck. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he mumbled into the warm skin, “but I’m not a big fan of waiting.” He squeezed Phil’s ass and then slid his hand up and around the curve of flesh, pressing his thumb against the warm skin just inside the ridge of Phil’s hipbone, and Clint was rewarded with the sound of Phil’s breath hitching.

Phil had one hand clutching Clint’s back and the other scratching across Clint’s scalp in an entirely pleasing way. “You’re, ah, making it very hard to do the scary relationship talk.”

When the words finally sank in Clint shoved himself away from Phil, leaving several feet of cold night air between them. “Are you breaking up with me?” he asked.

“ _No!_ ” Phil replied. He reached out and grasped Clint’s hand, tugging him closer. “Definitely not.”

“Oh,” Clint said, settling down beside Phil. “Well, are you sure it can’t wait until morning?” he asked, walking his fingers down Phil’s front and then sliding his hand around to Phil’s hip as Phil rolled on his side to face him.

“It seems relevant,” Phil said seriously as Clint hooked two fingers into the front of Phil’s pants.

Clint smirked at Phil and raised an eyebrow. “Is it a sex talk?” he asked. He could get behind sex talk, and sexy talk, and sexing talk, and talking during sex. So long as sex with Phil was involved in some capacity, the talking thing seemed promising.

“It’s a condom talk,” Phil replied, his own hand sitting warmly on Clint’s side. It was resting between the sensitive skin over Clint’s ribs and the mildly aroused skin of the four-inch radius spreading out from his crotch. Clint hummed absently, half of his mind occupied with devising a way to convince Phil to move his hand one way or the other. Or one way after the other. Or perhaps getting both hands involved.

“Condoms are great,” Clint said, leaning in for another kiss and sliding his hand back inside Phil’s pants, cupping his hip. “I’m a big fan,” he mumbled against Phil’s mouth. “Talk over.”

“For everything?” Phil asked.

“Sure,” Clint replied. Then he considered the question, and pulled back. Because there were a lot of different activities that fell under the umbrella of sex, and Clint honestly hadn’t considered using condoms for most of them. Because while semen could be sticky and gross, there were moments when it had its charms. “Wait. You don’t want to-?” 

“Clint,” Phil said patiently, which Clint knew was not a great sign for his libido, “some of your co-workers drained about a quart of blood from me to see if I’d been infected. I was swabbed. Intimately swabbed.”

“And you’re fine, right?” Clint replied. “Nothing gross growing in you?”

Phil pressed his mouth into a thin line and sighed through his nose. Despite having their hands on one another and being close enough that Clint could feel Phil’s breath across his chest, there was a sudden distance between them. “How often is this going to happen?” Phil asked, and Clint didn’t reply because he honestly didn’t know. Phil stroked his thumb back and forth across Clint’s chest, and Clint wondered what must be showing on his face to prompt Phil to try and calm him. “How often are you going to get hurt and we’re going to go through the whole quarantine rigmarole?”

Clint did better when questions had solid boundaries, and he gave Phil something in the general category of a smile. “Probably, uh... It doesn’t happen all that often. A few times per quarter.” And Clint had always been declared fit and healthy afterwards, or given one shot or another and told to come back if organs started haemorrhaging. It was hardly ever as serious as the mess he’d just been dragged through.

Phil didn’t look entirely pleased with the information, but he also wasn’t kicking Clint out of his bed and reaching for the antiseptic hand gel. “So what are we going to do about that?” he asked.

Clint had never had an action plan for this kind of thing. One of the benefits of his position within SHIELD was that he usually heard about it if someone he’d been dabbling with ended up in medical. With the risks that agents took in the field and the health care that SHIELD provided, passing on an infection was more an embarrassment than a serious health risk. Of course, sometimes the infection wasn’t a burning crotch so much as a horribly invasive psychic alien parasite. Phil definitely had reason to be concerned.

“You want to stop doing stuff with me?” Clint asked. It seemed like the most direct solution. And there could be ways to work around that decision – Phil was good with words, and a sex life that was reduced to phone sex and sexting would be... frustrating. Frustrating, but maybe not unbearable.

“No,” Phil replied, and Clint couldn’t help sagging a little with relief. “But if something like this happens again, do we hold off until you get a clean bill of health? Do we use barrier protection all the time regardless?”

Clint raised an eyebrow at Phil. “You want a note from my doctor before we fuck?”

“That depends,” Phil replied, mirroring Clint’s expression, “can I trust you on this?”

Clint pulled his hand out of Phil’s underpants and pushed himself up off the bed. “Well, shit,” he said as he reached over Phil and down to the floor to grab his shirt. Clint saved lives for a living and Phil didn’t trust him not to kill people with his dick. That was what it boiled down to and Clint was suddenly too drained to even feel properly angry about it, just a sullen kind of unsurprised.

“Is this what you do?” Phil asked as Clint pulled his shirt on with rough movements. “Bail out when things don’t go to plan?”

Clint snorted. “You’re kind of kicking me while I’m down, here. And I don’t like foreign places at the best of times.” He sat at the foot of Phil’s rumpled bed, tucking his shirt into his pants. “I don’t like not having access to my exits.” It was something that he tried to downplay around Phil because he knew that it seemed like a weird habit to people who were not in his line of business. Tony had assured him of that many times.

Phil sat up and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Well, sit on the window sill or something you have to. Find an exit and loiter for a while.” 

Clint paused. “Really?”

“If you need to go, you need to go,” Phil said, as if dropping out a window and disappearing into the night was a perfectly normal thing that happened sometimes in the middle of a conversation. “But we need to talk about this.”

Clint looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers. The right and left felt about the same, and he thought that within a week the tips of his fingers probably wouldn’t tingle at all. His shoulder was a neat stretch to transplanted skin, and maybe the scars at the edges would fade with time. “I’m not dirty,” he said to his own palms.

Phil slumped into place beside Clint and wrapped an arm around his waist, pausing to press a kiss to Clint’s shoulder in such an easy and casual expression of affection. “I’d still like you if you were,” he said. Clint scowled because he was pretty sure the correct answer should have been, _‘I know that’_. But he’d been through some intimate swabbing of his own in the past, and after a moment of reflection he accepted that such a procedure was generally a precursor to things ending. And Phil was saying that he was willing to pay that price of admission if he had to. Clint wrapped an arm around Phil’s shoulders and pulled him closer. 

“You get cut up a lot and you skip out on your medical checks,” Phil continued. 

“Not always,” Clint protested, because he always got a medical assessment if the medics arrived on site before he had a chance to leave.

“If you put your fluids in me,” Phil said bluntly, “you need to be responsible for them.”

Clint snorted a laugh. “‘Fluids in you’? Least sexy phrase ever.”

“I’ve taught sex ed,” Phil replied with a wry smile.

“If I ever need to get a condom on a banana, I know who to call,” Clint said, and Phil squeezed his middle again. It seemed like a fond gesture, and Clint liked it. “I’m sorry you got stuck in quarantine,” he said.

Phil shrugged one shoulder, his arm shifting across Clint’s back. “It brought back some bad memories,” he admitted. “I was young and gay and mostly-single in the eighties. It had its scary moments.”

“I’m sorry,” Clint said again.

“I like you, Clint,” Phil said. “You’re fun and smart and sexy to look at.”

“Not sexy in action?”

Phil gave him a sly smile. “Maybe with some practice.”

“ _Hey!_ ”

“And all I really need from you now,” Phil continued, “is to know that you will at least try to stay healthy and to not kill me with your semen.”

Clint snorted. “Okay,” he said. “When you put it like that.” He rested his forehead against Phil’s temple and they leaned against each other in the dark for a moment. “I’m not usually the guy to say this, but maybe we shouldn’t cut to the chase tonight.”

“I have to be up in four hours,” Phil replied. “You weren’t going to be getting any action anyway.”

“You know, total honesty is a little overrated.”

Phil snorted and pressed another kiss against Clint’s shoulder. “You going to stick around?” he asked, he words sinking in to the worn cotton of Clint’s tee. Clint didn’t know if Phil meant for that night or for a long time to come, but the answer seemed fairly simple either way.

“Yeah,” he replied, kicking his boots off. He shuffled back up the bed, tugging at Phil as he did. “Come on.”

It took a while to settle, between Clint shucking his pants off and Phil trying to straighten out the quilt while Clint was still lying on top of it. Clint’s usually versatile array of sleeping positions was still restricted by his shoulder, so there was some shuffling and rearranging as they lay down together. “But for future reference,” Clint said as Phil subtly overrode Clint’s careful positioning and claimed the role of the big spoon, “I’m really down with condoms.”

“I know,” Phil said, his voice warm with amusement. “I’ve seen your wallet.”

Clint went still. “What were you doing with my wallet?” he asked carefully. Clint’s wallet had a few interesting things in it, and he did not leave it lying around for good reason.

“Scoping out your security pass,” Phil replied easily.

Clint squeezed his eyes shut and inhaled deeply through his nose, fighting down the wave of angry paranoia that he could feel bubbling up his spine. “And why was that?” he asked with forced lightness.

Phil was quiet for a long moment and Clint waited him out, both of them tense and alert despite being tangled up in one another again. When Phil replied, his voice was a mix of frustration and resignation. “You’ve haven’t heard the story,” he said, a dull statement.

“I think I may have gotten the abridged version,” Clint replied tightly. Natasha had told Clint about Phil visiting him while he was in the coma, and between Phil’s bedside visit and Bruce just quietly geeking out over wyrm physiology he had gotten a fairly clear picture of how they had gotten the Sakrdsvenge out of him. In retrospect, it was easy to see the gaps in the story that everyone had assumed someone else would fill. Clint was going to have words with his friends about assumed knowledge and leaving him out of the loop. 

Phil patted Clint’s stomach and then rolled away, pulling open the drawer of his bedside table and rummaging around in it. He slipped into place against Clint’s back and pressed something small and thin into Clint’s hand. Clint peered at it in the darkness, holding it up so that the dim light from the window caught the edges. Clint had good eyesight, even in the dark.

“This is a fake security pass,” he said flatly.

“I made it myself,” Phil replied, and there was a little pride in his voice.

Clint twisted around to peer at Phil. “You actually got somewhere with this?”

“Several times,” Phil answered. “Ms Potts was the only one who spotted it as a fake.”

“You ran into Pepper?”

“I went to Stark Tower to get the address of the hospital you were in.”

Clint let that information sink in, tapping the security pass against his front teeth. “That... explains a lot,” he said at last. The dark look Hill had given him when Phil had come up in conversation. Natasha’s assertion that she didn’t know how Phil had gotten into the facility. Tony’s interest in Phil – swanking into restricted facilities was practically one of Tony’s hobbies, and Clint could imagine him wanting to get a look at the guy who had casually meandered past both Stark and SHIELD security. Tony’s curiosity was going to become a pain if something didn’t distract him soon, Clint could sense it.

“I can’t let you keep this,” he said, waggling the pass in the air.

“Of course,” Phil replied, tugging it from Clint’s grip and dropping it back on to the bedside table. “You can confiscate it in the morning.”

Clint had a deep suspicion that the pass would be nowhere to be found by the time the sun came up, but Fury and Natasha – two of the most paranoid and deadly people Clint knew – both approved of Phil in their own ways. Well, Phil hadn’t suddenly felt a deep need to move across the country and never speak to Clint again, which at leant meant that Fury didn’t actively disapprove of him. And Clint had already had one scary relationship conversation that night. He was willing to let the security breach be someone else’s problem for a while. He slowly uncoiled his muscles, and Phil shifted closer and rested his forehead at the top of Clint’s spine.

Clint had been through a rough few weeks and falling asleep with Phil pressed up against his back seemed like a good antidote for those last coils of stress caught up in his joints. Phil was already falling asleep, and Clint was happy to follow his example. They could talk over the finer details of their issues in the morning.


End file.
